Quotes About Artistry

Remember, as artists we don't know diddly. We're winging it every day. For us to try to second-guess our Muse the way a hack second-guesses his audience is condescension to heaven. It's blasphemy and sacrilege. Instead let's ask ourselves like that new mother: What do I feel growing inside me? Let me bring that forth, if I can, for its own sake and not for what it can do for me or how it can advance my standing.

Next to Resistance, rational thought is the artist or entrepreneur's worst enemy. Bad things happen when we employ rational thought, because rational thought comes from the ego. Instead, we want to work from the Self, that is, from instinct and intuition, from the unconscious.

Genius is a Latin word; the Romans used it to denote an inner spirit, holy and inviolable, which watches over us, guiding us to our calling. A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center. It is our soul's seat, the vessel that holds our being-in-potential, our star's beacon and Polaris.

No matter what a writer or artist may tell you, they have no clue what they're doing before they do it—and, for the most part, while they're doing it.

The artist is grounded in freedom. He is not afraid of it. He is lucky. He was born in the right place. He has a core of self- confidence, of hope for the future. He believes in progress and evolution. His faith is that humankind is advancing, however haltingly and imperfectly, toward a better world.

From the epiphanal moment at the end of her hero's journey, the artist's life is about the works she will produce. These taken in sum will comprise her body of work. They're her oeuvre. They're also her destiny. If she does it right, they will constitute upon completion a pretty fair expression of why she was put on Earth. They'll define who she is. They will be her gift for the people.

This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don't. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.

The writer is an infantryman. He knows that progress is measured in yards of dirt extracted from the enemy one day, one hour, one minute at a time and paid for in blood. The artist wears combat boots. He looks in the mirror and sees GI Joe. Remember, the Muse favors working stiffs. She hates prima donnas. To the gods the supreme sin is not rape or murder, but pride. To think of yourself as a mercenary, a gun for hire, implants the proper humility. It purges pride and preciousness.

A real writer (or artist or entrepreneur) has something to give. She has lived enough and suffered enough and thought deeply enough about her experience to be able to process it into something that is of value to others, even if only as entertainment.

Remember, as artists we don't know diddly. We're winging it every day. For us to try to second-guess our Muse the way a hack second-guesses his audience is condescension to heaven. It's blasphemy and sacrilege.

I write all day. I have no idea what I'm doing. I have never heard of narrative structure or theme or concept or act 1, act 2, act 3. I work entirely on instinct. I'm writing, as I said, about Burton Lines, about the trucking company. I'm writing about myself.

The Muse honors the working stiff.

I wish every aspiring writer or artist could have a year or two years like this—a season when you have no responsibilities except to your own Muse and your own daimon, a run of months when you're invisible to everybody but yourself, when you don't give a shit about anything except the challenge before you, when you could drop dead on the street and no one would stop except to step over your cold corpse, and you don't care.

The song we're composing already exists in potential. Our work is to find it. Can we hear it in our head? It exists, like a signal coming from a faraway radio tower. Our job is to tune to that frequency.

Why didn't I see this before? That my creative life is my deepest prayer. That I must pray it from my heart, from my soul.

That was the thing mauma and I loved, our time with the quilts.

Winemaking should be a mystery with a hint of magic.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.

Every style is a means of insisting on something.

Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility. It has hardened into an idea ...

If a person loves something above all else, if he values the work of his heart and hands, then he should naturally, without hesitation, pour into it his whole soul, undivided and pure. Great art demands nothing less.

Styles are merely the copying of what others have done, perhaps done better than we. God has given us our talents so as not to copy the talents of others, but rather to use our own imagination to obtain the revelation of True Beauty.

If I don't love the feelings I have while creating those windows, I'm only working for coin and not from soul.